18 ms·

Find SF parking cops

849 points by alazsengul 1y ago

https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/

renewiltord 1y ago
Cool app! What a pity. I wish we had more of them here in SOMA. Big open void.
supportengineer 1y ago
Very well done! Outstanding site, it is clear and easy to use. I supposed you'll be forced offline soon due to legal threats.
- jacobolus 1y ago
  If the goal is to prevent this kind of thing, it would probably be better to just not put the ticket info online, publicly visible, in real time.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbarre 1y ago
    It looks like this system applied security through obscurity, more or less, though. I doubt it's the intention of the system to make all tickets "publicly visible" in this way. I'm not sure we'll legal threats involved (who knows, hopefully not) but I suspect the city will be motivated to find some way to lock down the system to prevent this kind of enumeration attack on their database.
sealthedeal 1y ago
Great job!!
packeted 1y ago
Wow, great work. This is the kind of citizen hackery we need in society :)
- knowitnone3 1y ago
  [flagged]
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 1y ago
  Why do you think that a tool to help people break the rules is somehow good for society?
  - majkinetor 1y ago
    It makes rules harder to break? It inspires kids to be knowledgeable because it can be cool? It teaches thinking outside the box? It makes you question your surroundings and not blindly following the rules?
    - oatmeal1 1y ago
      That's a list of bad reasons. Could we get a list of good reasons?
      - labubunightmare 1y ago
        > posts on Hacker News > is offended by non-conformity
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Why do you think breaking rules is automatically bad for society?
    - PpEY4fu85hkQpn 1y ago
      [flagged]
lanewinfield 1y ago
another riley walz banger!!!
- gala8y 1y ago
  Yeah, slowly going through https://walzr.com/ https://walzr.com/. Definitely not his first rodeo.
  - adolph 1y ago
    Worth it for this jpeg: https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Lammy 1y ago
Love the leaderboard feature. Relevant fee breakdown: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2024/05/sfmta_fees_and_fines_for_posting_effective_april_16_2025.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
- OJFord 1y ago
  Seems weird to me (from nowhere near SF) that some of the cheapest things to do are to block fire stations, fire hydrants and 'fire lanes' (I assume that's like a bus lane but for fire engines, in places that's common enough for whatever reason, like right by a fire station?) - wheelchair/disability related stuff is much more penalised, but even all sorts of other 'regular' mis-parking seems for some reason slightly more expensive than blocking fire crews. Odd isn't it? Have I misunderstood?
  - Lammy 1y ago
    > Have I misunderstood? It doesn't count the glass shop bill when the fire fighters gleefully fuck up your car to run the hose between the side windows.
    - apsurd 1y ago
      Gleefully? because they should express remorse and handle your car with care vs you know, putting out that fire?
      - Spivak 1y ago
        Brother in law is a firefighter, gleefully is exactly the correct term here. According to him getting to bust windows to run the hose is literally their favorite thing to do. To the point where even if they don't actually need to, or it would be slower, they'll still do it. It's apparently a matter of principle.
        apsurd 1y ago
simonbolivar 1y ago
Love it! how do you use apple maps on web?
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/ If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
- FinnKuhn 1y ago
  You can use "Map Kit JS". You have 250,000 free map views per day, however you need an apple developer account https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs
smith-kyle 1y ago
Amazing!
linehedonist 1y ago
Amazing. Would be even better if it kept everything in Pacific time. A little confusing to see “3 hours ago” just because I’m on the East Coast.
- FinnKuhn 1y ago
  As someone from Europe I was a bit confused why SF parking cops seemed to only work throughout the night.
- pimlottc 1y ago
  Ah, I’m in Central, I just assume the data feed was delayed by 2 hours for reason.
throwaway93626 1y ago
I've thought about building something that uses CV to detect parking cops near me, but this is even better! Now just add a paid feature to send alerts when there is a cop within a certain radius of you ;)
mikeodds 1y ago
Thats cool. Would be nice to see annual median take from each warden.
paulsutter 1y ago
Nice to see historical data to show ticket density somehow (different areas have very different enforcement)
enjoylife 1y ago
Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?
- renewiltord 1y ago
  It's just his area street cleaning no? You'll get whacked by that pretty easy. On a different day might be a different guy.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  It's is amusing that you question whether parking citations correlate with crime rates. The reason they give out tickets for this is that these people have parked unlawfully.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    Traffic tickets are typically civil, not criminal.
    - jeffbee 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > So is tax evasion No. “In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion
        jeffbee 1y ago
        https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6663 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6663 Moreover: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part25/irm_25-001-006 https://www.irs.gov/irm/part25/irm_25-001-006
dheera 1y ago
Need to pair this with an API for Tesla FSD so that cars just move themselves automatically
- spankalee 1y ago
  Or just pay the very reasonable fee for storing your private property on public land.
  - dheera 1y ago
    I'm fine with paying the fee but (a) It should be automatic -- if they have the tech to enforce parking like a witch hunt, they should have the tech to just charge people for parking automatically just like Fastrak and everything else. Just have parking meters look for a Fastrak transponder and charge that account for parking, and also automatically send texts to the phone number and e-mail associated with the Fastrak account if time limit is reached. Make the city a good UX. Parking payment should be a zero-effort operation. I shouldn't have to make a wager on how many minutes I'm going to take to finish my meal and risk wagering too many minutes (overpaid) or too little (get fined). Just charge me according to my actual usage. (b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.
    - CalRobert 1y ago
      Believe it or not, parking reformists tend to agree! The fact we even have a parking "fine" indicates that it isn't really priced right; if you park somewhere you should just pay the market rate for doing so, whether it's for 30 minutes or 30 days. The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
    - avidiax 1y ago
      Every time I drive in SF, I pay for parking, and then get a parking ticket. Apparently I'm supposed to know that a red parking meter is for trucks. The "trucks-only sign", if there was even supposed to be one, wasn't attached to that meter or the parking sign. The other time I was the first to arrive on a block, and paid the wrong meter out of confusion.
prepend 1y ago
Clever how you figured out the pattern in ticket numbers and how they relate to individual officers.
ceayo 1y ago
Nice apple-like design, looks really good! Especially those three dots in the top-left.
pj_mukh 1y ago
Part of me says, “What a clever hack! Can I get a notification feature wrt where I parked?” The other part of me says “Can we just use Public goods more responsibly instead of scratching and clawing our way through maximizing every second of monopolizing public spaces for our personal property storage”
spankalee 1y ago
> $158 > 99 Grove St > 10:43 AM • Truck > Blocking bike lane Thank you, Officer 0227!
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    >Wonders why shelves are empty when delivery drivers can't park their trucks anywhere uh don't big shops usually have truck ports?
    - mc32 1y ago
      Safeway? Sure. Mom-and-Pops? Not usually. How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park? Ok maybe in some locations they can park a few blocks away and deliver with hand trucks —but then they risk taking much more time to deliver and going back to a broken-in truck or van.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park? The only city where this is a problem is New York, because we don’t have alleys in our densest neighbourhoods. And in New York, our solution is for folks to park illegally and the meter maids to print tickets which are treated as a business expense. In San Francisco, park in an alley, deliver at night, or park away from the site and use a scooter or whatnot to make the last mile. (Or eat the ticket.)
        MisterTea 1y ago
MontagFTB 1y ago
This is amazing. Can we get a heat map of ticket disbursements?
- spankalee 1y ago
  Hopefully the city already has that, ideally correlated with the coverage from GPS on the officers' cars or devices. Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.
fnord77 1y ago
Is this real time? I don't see anything moving.
baggy_trough 1y ago
What would really be incredible would be if the city made this kind of data public intentionally.
- jer0me 1y ago
  They do! There's a data set, updated daily: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citations-Fines/ab4h-6ztd/about_data https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation... It currently has 22 million parking tickets dating back to 2008.
  - baggy_trough 1y ago
    Incredible!
  - Ancapistani 1y ago
    Huh - I don't know if I like those data being available in that format. I feel like they could probably split it up so specific plates aren't available to the public alongside the lat/long. As it is, it would likely be an effective way to track someone's routines. All you need is a license plate and you can likely get a list of many places they've been since 2008. That's especially true since it includes citations for things like street cleaning violations, which in my experience most people will get at least once when living somewhere. I bet a lot of those plates can be tied to at least the block the owner resides with this dataset.
khuey 1y ago
I'd be interested in a "loserboard", i.e. who consistently writes the fewest tickets.
- jakelazaroff 1y ago
  The loserboard I'd be interested in is which license plates consistently receive the most tickets.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway93626 1y ago
    I'd guess the top spots are just super wealthy people who figure that at their "hourly rate", paying for parking is basically more costly than just eating the tickets. Like if someone's time is worth $10k+/hour, the parking tickets are basically just premium parking fees that are still "cheaper" than spending even a minute dealing with payment... Let your assistant pay whatever tickets you get in the mail instead.
    - edm0nd 1y ago
      This was our old CFO. He would park directly in front of our office building that was located inside a large complex that had a movie theater, fancy restaurants, and all kinda stuffs like that. They couldnt tow so they would just write a ticket for being in the spot after like 60 minutes. He racked up thousands in tickets and simply just didnt pay them. Never got in trouble either lol. Since it was private property, I guess the owners just didnt care that much. He was a super douche and ended up quitting thankfully.
    - _2d30 1y ago
      They are definitely people who live in their cars and don’t pay the tickets. EDIT: did a search to see if anyone had analyzed this and here’s reporting that shows basically this. None of the top cars are remotely luxury, eg. https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/15/parking-tickets-san-francisco-sfmta-transit-car-tow-transportation-vehicles-citations/ https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/15/parking-tickets-san-franci...
whiplash451 1y ago
The reverse engineer of the ID system is worth its pound of google riddle. Well done.
spankalee 1y ago
It would be great to see more automatic payment and enforcement. It's great that buses can issue tickets for blocking bus lanes, but I would absolutely love for their to be more automatic enforcement of blocking bike lanes and meter violations. I'm not in SF a lot these days, but I have noticed some particularly fancy parking meters that at least have tap-to-pay and might have more. Instead of a ticket, you should just be charged for how long you stay. And instead of a strict time limit, just raise the rates the longer you parks.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  Is it illegal to block bike lanes in SF? I ask because it is not illegal to do so in California, according to the learner's permit test my daughter recently took.
  - scottbez1 1y ago
    The DMV is unfortunately wrong about this, with an invalid interpretation of CVC - the DMV handbook is NOT the law (it's a simplistic layman's interpretation), and is not a valid legal defense. That said, in SF proper it's absolutely inarguably illegal as a violation called "Obstructing traffic" in the SF transportation code. A bike lane is an active travel lane for vehicles as defined under the CVC (including bicycles), and therefore stopping in one is illegal just like stopping in a car lane. I've had drivers cited for this in the past.
    - rahimnathwani 1y ago
      I've had drivers cited for this in the past. I'm curious how you've managed to achieve this? I haven't found SF311 very responsive to requests related to illegal parking. Even if they respond, wouldn't the car be gone by the time they show up?
      - scottbez1 1y ago
        Yeah, they ignore SF311 reports by policy. I've managed it by flagging down an amazingly helpful parking control officer that happened to be in the area, or else by calling and reporting an obstruction of traffic (not mentioning the bike lane) and then waiting until the PCO arrived and talking to them. The officers have almost always been helpful, but I think they generally tend towards lower confrontation and more "efficient" violations like street sweeping or expired meters by default (or perhaps directed by management).
MontagFTB 1y ago
[flagged]
kenmacd 1y ago
+11 and +4 seem check-digit-y From the limited dataset it looks the last digit comes from: last digit = (<sum of previous the digits> + 2) mod 7
- Aloisius 1y ago
  It is a check digit, but it's just: n % 7. So ticket 98494660 has citation #984,946,605 Ticket 98494661 will have citation #984,946,616 (The example of the pattern mistakenly starts with an citation number #984,946,606 which they said does not exist, rather than #984,946,605 which is the one shown in the image)
jimmyl02 1y ago
This is super fun! The apple maps look for the "Find My" feel was a really nice touch
jshchnz 1y ago
this guy never misses
_2d30 1y ago
Oh man this is so fun but I slightly hate it. It probably won’t help people avoid parking enforcement much but it could somewhat which sucks because I think parking enforcement is a very good thing. More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.
apavlinovic 1y ago
This works and feels amazing. How are you doing the swipe up panel?
poorman 1y ago
Someone should plot this on a heat map so we can see what areas the parking cops don't write tickets for!
kami8845 1y ago
Amazing to see the scale of it. As a piece of feedback my assumption is that different officers are assigned to different areas and so since street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas, this will allow different officers to float to the top in different weeks. Having at least a 2 week lookback for the leaderboard is probably best. Otherwise great work!
- Swizec 1y ago
  > street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas On my block we get it 2x/week. I've never seen a street sweeper come by and the street is always dirty, but I sure have gotten tickets for leaving my vehicle out front overnight on the wrong day.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    I think the street is dirty precisely because there are vehicles out on the wrong day such that the street sweeper couldn't sweep that part of the street. Getting a ticket means the street sweeper couldn't do its job and you don't see clean streets.
  - gregschlom 1y ago
    As far as I know you only get a ticket if you're actually parked there when the sweeper comes by. There's a parking cop car following the sweeper and ticketing the cars. You're allowed to re-park in the street after the sweeper has done its job, even if it's still technically street sweeping time. So if you've got a ticket, there almost certainly was a sweeper that came by at that time.
    - dodos 1y ago
      Pretty sure it varies depending on where you live. iirc When I was in SF the tickets would get distributed ahead of time and the sweeper would follow within an hour or so. Once the sweeper went by you were free to re-park.
obblekk 1y ago
This is awesome. Coolest hacker demo I've seen in a while.
scottbez1 1y ago
Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets. I get it - street cleaning are "easy" tickets to write in bulk, and therefore efficient ROI for PCO time, but they're not the most important violations to cite compared to safety-critical things like blocked bike lanes (which SFMTA has an official policy to completely ignore citizen reports thereof), double-parking, or red zone (including daylighting) violations. Part of the issue is improper fine structure (though I think this is at least partly controlled by the state?) - tickets for blocking a bike lane are rarely written and therefore it's a good bet to just do it and odds are in aggregate it's cheaper than paying for parking legally. UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Uber etc rely on this as a cheap cost of doing business, externalizing their costs onto the safety of the public. SFMTA even offers bulk payment discounts to UPS, when they should be charging escalating fines for repeat offenders.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets. Why wouldn't it be? It's basically spawn camping or deer baiting or shooting fish in a barrel or whatever analogy you want to use.
  - scottbez1 1y ago
    Agreed, and it provides important revenue for transportation projects and helps keep our streets clean so I wouldn't want SFMTA to adjust that focus as-is. I just wish we had proper (read: higher, accounting for real negative externalities and likelihood of citation) fines for other violations that pose active public safety concerns such that SFMTA would be incentivized to also focus on those and not just the "easy" ones. It would also disincentivize antisocial behavior by repeat offenders.
- hahahacorn 1y ago
  On principle, I agree. In practice, delivery vehicles don't have a place to safely stop, because that space is allocated to free street parking for private vehicles. Subsidized street parking for cars are externalizing their costs onto UPS/Fedex/Amazon, etc. who are then passing that cost along to the safety of the public.
primitivesuave 1y ago
I did a fascinating analysis of SFMTA data a few years back. They posted a public list of names and license plates [1] that they refuse to take down, despite many emails from me over the years. I found a particular license plate that belonged to a plumber with an impeccable 5 star reputation on Yelp, whose business in SF was effectively ended by street sweeping fines. He accidentally paid the same ticket twice, which resulted in his work vehicle being towed for excessive delinquency on the original ticket, which culminated in him moving his plumbing business to Utah. I mentioned his 5 star reputation because several people got on Yelp over the years and described situations where he wouldn't even charge them money if he could fix something in a few minutes. It was very sad to learn how the SFTMA ran an honest plumber out of our city, and still won't take his name down off the list below (even 8 years after the deadline to respond). I don't mean to draw undue attention to that list - please bombard the SFTMA with emails to take it down, it is a very obvious invasion of privacy and laughably unnecessary. 1. https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-2017 https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-20...
- hn_throw_250915 1y ago
  Reading this comment I’m stumped as to what SF can learn from this. There’s a lesson in there somewhere but I have no idea what it could be. Oh well. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fBoqMMPoU9k https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fBoqMMPoU9k
- ronsor 1y ago
  > street sweeping fines Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
  - mmmlinux 1y ago
    From all the trash that everyone leaves everywhere. and broken glass from car windows getting smashed in. its not a nice place.
  - scottbez1 1y ago
    Generally to keep streets safe to drive on, and pleasant to live near. In particular, SF receives very little rainfall for most of the year, which means that leaves and debris easily accumulate rather than being washed away at regular intervals. Drivers also have a tendency to leave parts of their vehicles - like broken glass and plastic/metal shards - behind when they routinely crash into each other, which accumulate on the street. Without regular sweeping, those can pose hazards to other drivers and bicyclists, and risk being washed into the bay via storm drains if not swept.
RyanOD 1y ago
Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe. There is a very real reason why most intersections require drivers to park 20-30 feet away. Please think of the safety of others and adhere to this rule.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- vhcr 1y ago
  This is solved with better infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension
  - RyanOD 1y ago
    Yes, I've seen some of this. While it certainly helps, it seems like a waste of limited resources. Why can't some people just follow such a simple rule?
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Waste of what resources? If anything I'd expect the sidewalk to be cheaper.
      - godelski 1y ago
        There's a difference between starting from scratch and modifying existing infrastructure
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        There is. But the post saying it's a better method isn't suggesting extra labor to do modifications. That's useful just as pure knowledge, and also it can be applied into future designs or when parts of the road wear out.
jonahx 1y ago
What's funny is secure IDs could have easily prevented this but, even if the city discovers it and wants to shut it down now, I'd bet actually fixing the system would be too costly (IDs tend to couple to everything).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mulmen 1y ago
  Just add a delay.
- odensc 1y ago
  Pretty simple fix: require more data to look up a citation, like the number, issue date and plate/VIN (this is how my city does it). Technically doesn't make the scraping impossible if you wanna try every permutation of a license plate, but makes it mostly infeasible. Currently it just requires the sequential citation number [1], which is how the data is being scraped so easily. [1]: https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input.jsp https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input...
- edm0nd 1y ago
  super easy fix just update all the tickets at the end of the day in one single batch / put time delay on the data renders the site useless instantly
dcreater 1y ago
wow, great work. But is this legal? Feels like no and will be takendown
- dcreater 1y ago
  Looks like I was right - took all of 4hrs to go down.
Supercompressor 1y ago
FYI the ticketing time is showing incorrectly out of Pacific time, e.g. here in Eastern all recent activity shows as 3 hours ago. Not a big deal as almost all users would be in Pacific, but wanted to mention. Great work though, this is rad.
jonny_eh 1y ago
Probably a good time to tell people that SF operates a "Text Before Tow Program" where you can get a warning that you're about to get towed: https://www.sfmta.com/text-tow-program https://www.sfmta.com/text-tow-program
- ihaveajob 1y ago
  This is fantastic. It really signals that the point is not to get money from you, but to free up the parking spot.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    They also ticket without towing, where the point is entirely to get money from you.
    - godelski 1y ago
      Or to say "don't do this"
    - arghwhat 1y ago
      Where I'm from there's no concept of towing on any parking violations. No one has the right to touch your vehicle, and if the police is involved they'd just contact the owner. The police would only move a car if it's a danger to the public. A tow truck is only something you'd call for assistance, not something you fear seeing. (Parking fines suck, but the municipal ones are usually more reasonable here, even if they don't always get the rules right. It's the parking companies managing large private parking lots, often for free to the lot owner, that are absurd.)
      - noahlt 1y ago
        Where I'm from there's no concept of using public space to store your personal belongings without paying for it.
        1y ago
dinkblam 1y ago
can you find out how much revenue the city makes each week with those tickets?
- primitivesuave 1y ago
  No - you would have to file a FOIA request with the SFMTA, and then tabulate the "Total Paid" column in the response files. Below is my FOIA request template for the SFMTA [1] to assist anyone who is interested in doing this. > Please provide all possible information on all parking citations issued between 2009 and the present day. This should include any information related to the car (make, etc), license plate, ticket, ticketer, ticket reason(s), financial information (paid, etc), court information (contested, etc), situational (eg, time, location), and photos/videos. Specifically, please provide the most recent data from the dataset I have received in past FOIA requests, with the following headers: > Issue Year, Ticket Number, Tick Issue Date, Tick Issue Time, Agency, Tick Badge Issued, Veh Make, Veh Body, Tick VIN, Tick RP State, Tick RP Plate, Plate Exp Date, Violation, Violation Desc, Tick Meter, Tick Street No, Tick Street Name, Suspend Code, Suspend Desc, Tick Suspend Date, Tick Dispo Code, Tick Dispo Desc, Tick Dispo Date Total Paid, Total Amt Due 1. https://www.sfmta.com/public-records-requests https://www.sfmta.com/public-records-requests
- geor9e 1y ago
  You can look at the leaderboard at the end of the day and sum the daily intake if you want.
1zael 1y ago
I'm missing something here. How did you get the dataset for this? And that too, in real-time?
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
  https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
  - 1zael 1y ago
    ahh thank you!
- k8sToGo 1y ago
  Explained here https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
  - 1zael 1y ago
    ahh thank you!
- vanshg 1y ago
  Explained here: https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
assemmedhat 1y ago
Awesome. The leading officer in the dashboard should have a raise :)
alexchantavy 1y ago
Oh wow this is from the same author as https://walzr.com/bop-spotter https://walzr.com/bop-spotter -- love these projects
- samtheDamned 1y ago
  Oh I remember this website nice to be reminded of this!
- rconti 1y ago
  I knew that domain name (which is blocked at work, for some reason) sounded familiar. So wait. cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?
  - beeb 1y ago
    dop-spotter is next
    - rconti 1y ago
      That's easy, it'll mostly highlight North Beach[1] 1. https://italysegreta.com/dop-ingredients-of-neapolitan-pizza/ https://italysegreta.com/dop-ingredients-of-neapolitan-pizza...
    - ericcumbee 1y ago
      Hold for wap-spotter
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Odd detail about the page, on the left it says "Audio feed courtesy of Orchestra" but the link goes to some dystopian panopticon kinda surveillance app.
  - hundchenkatze 1y ago
    I think they're being cheeky. I assume Orchestra is the dystopian company providing the "ShotSpotter" service to SF, and bop spotter is piggy backing on the api.
Ancapistani 1y ago
This is kinda taking me aback a bit :). I live in a small town (<15k), with the nearest city of 100k people or more several hours away. Having this degree of detail and low latency is impressive. I happen to be in SF right now on business, and walked outside. There was an officer about a block away, right where the map said they were ~10m ago.
smurda 1y ago
This is why the internet and HN should exist <3
Simulacra 1y ago
Fascinating and good to see enforcement actually occuring
thatguymike 1y ago
This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1... Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.
- Alive-in-2025 1y ago
  Excellent idea. Data trails would really show you have are walking their beat. So the obvious next step is randomizing the IDs of the ticket writers.
- typeofhuman 1y ago
  It's down.
  - hk__2 1y ago
    It’s up again.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
ProofHouse 1y ago
Can the city just keep the top five and fire the rest, you know tax savings lol although I’d get a parking ticket, surely
- hobofan 1y ago
  Not sure if there are any tax savings to be had. Even the 100th place on the leaderboard netted $2k in a half day of working, so I think every single one of them may provide positive income for the city.
- hnav 1y ago
  traffic enforcement is pretty much the only cashflow positive city business
neilv 1y ago
Let's say that some people are opposed to the city's enforcement of parking rules against them (people who don't want parking tickets for overstaying in a spot, nor for parking somewhere they aren't supposed to). Let's also say that some other people support the enforcement against that first group (e.g., small brick&mortar businesses, and people who want more parking available for quick errands). If the Opposed group uses big data to work around the enforcement, does that hurt the Supports group? What's fair in that situation?
- threatofrain 1y ago
  Opposition must come through legal means, because the cheapness and omnipresence of enforcement is only getting better, especially for SFPD on the tech front.
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  Who used big data first, who uses big data more, who has more big data to work with, who has big data they get to keep to themselves and who has to work with only big data that both have the same access to? F this supposed see the other side question.
- bko 1y ago
  San Francisco has a system for reporting parking violations. Residents can report illegal parking such as blocked driveways, sidewalk obstructions, double parking, and abandoned vehicles through the city’s SF311 platform. You can make a report on the 311 website, mobile app, or by calling 311. You receive a tracking number to monitor the response. https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  Just charge market rates for land. Overstaying (aka overconsumption) is mostly just a predictable consequence of selling something valuable at far below what its value.
  - nick49488171 1y ago
morkalork 1y ago
Hey @OP, make a leader board for the license plate with the most infractions
obventio56 1y ago
I would pay ~$10/month for email alerts when an officer is within a geofence of my car.
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
  Then someone will know where your car is at all times, and probably who you are... and that is monetizable (not from you).
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    Google maps is free to use so obviously I'm the product Google sells. I'd say I'm getting a fair deal letting "them" track my location. (Why does nobody ever complain about them insisting on gender neutral pronouns? They must be very powerful.)
    - runjake 1y ago
      Often times, even if you pay, you're still the product a company sells.
  - jaggederest 1y ago
    If you do not believe that is already true on multiple axes, you are probably mistaken. The combination of automated license plate scanners, phone beacon data, and behavioral metrics make that relatively straightforward to get, in aggregate. I worked on a project where we could tell how many users were in a given store at a time (historically, not realtime) based on wifi traces, mobile data aggregation from carriers, and bluetooth pings. We could generally back it up to even general demographic data like how much disposable income the users were likely to have. Interesting project, deeply worrying how much data is running around out there.
  - obventio56 1y ago
    If there is someone who wants this data, I am happy to sell... no need for a middle man.
  - AngryData 1y ago
giarc 1y ago
Officer 0438 appears to have begun his shift in Guadalajara https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS
- madamelic 1y ago
  Oh my god. A $107 ticket for an EXPIRED METER?! That's insanity. Turns out more than just thieves are thieves in SF.
- uyzstvqs 1y ago
  Appears to have been given on 3 El Dorado South, San Francisco. The map marker shows a street called Avenida South San Francisco, Mexico, in front of a bar called El Dorado.
- supportengineer 1y ago
  It's quite common for Bay Area workers to have a "supercommute"
  - RS-232 1y ago
    Don’t give ICE any ideas!
nycdatasci 1y ago
How are you handling the auth token/captcha on the website? I'm not a legal expert, but my impression is that automated solving of captchas during a scrape carries higher risk. That said, amazing project!
devadvance 1y ago
Very cool! There are a ton of opportunities like this with SF systems! For folks wondering about the public nature of this data: SFMTA separately publishes a full data set daily: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citations-Fines/ab4h-6ztd/about_data https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...
lavela 1y ago
Great implementation but reading the comments I wonder if there is really no sense of the streets as a commons you should use responsibly at all in the US. Not that I am not annoyed by parking tickets, but I am also thankful for the enforcement when I use any means of moving through the city other than a car and at least where I live parking violations are really under-enforced. Maybe that's the difference in San Francisco?
- hnav 1y ago
  Very little of that anywhere in the country, especially when it's the rights of drivers vs other road users. San Francisco is a bit better but gets bad when it goes through its boom cycles that bring lots of people in.
- smegma2 1y ago
  I agree with the sentiment but I want to point out that a car is not essential for most people living in SF, although many people outside the city think this. Around 35% of households don’t have a car: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2021/02/survey_findings_demographics.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
- nick_ 1y ago
  Nope, same in Toronto. Same everywhere I've been. Drivers all mentally turn into teenagers when it comes to anything to do with driving/parking. I'm very pro traffic and parking enforcement.
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 1y ago
  [flagged]
bfrink 1y ago
Seems that something's been broken. The normal way to look up ticket images manually at https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ no longer works, returning "Unauthorized" even after properly getting past the CAPTCHA.
geor9e 1y ago
"each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6…Only God knows why" That pattern feels suspiciously like how a tacked-on modulo check-digit would act. It seems the real citation number, x, excludes the last digit, and you only needed to +1 increment to it. Then they tack on a last digit, a check-digit, of (x+1) mod 7. That would be the same pattern. The contract for the system does have the clause "validate the data transcribed from handwritten Citations…a check-digit algorithm to control errors in the Citation number field" https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2018/03/4-3-18_item_14_contract_-_citation_and_permit_processing.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
- refurb 1y ago
  Nice observation!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Aloisius 1y ago
  It's just x % 7. They started their example pattern with an citation number 984,946,606 they earlier said wasn't valid rather than 984,946,605 given initially (and shown in the image).
  - pertsix 1y ago
    But why?
    - Aloisius 1y ago
      Just a mistake, I imagine. Probably just typed the pattern out starting with the last number they wrote, which unfortunately was invalid. > I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. ... So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610
    - dragontamer 1y ago
cramcgrab 1y ago
Division I, Section 7.3.3 Obstruction of Traffic Without Permit $1,000.00 “officer, I’ve got a permit to obstruct traffic!”
- zacharycohn 1y ago
  Yes, things like street closures for construction, film shoots, or Neighborhood Night Outs would all need permits to obstruct traffic/close the street.
  - xenadu02 1y ago
    Fun fact: as a regular citizen you can apply for such a permit online. I did this when we were moving houses to ensure the entire block in front of our house would be clear of cars (or we could tow if required) to make it possible to get a moving truck in on the one-lane street where double-parking would block all access. I filled out the forms. A week or so later the city dropped signs on the sidewalk warning of the upcoming closure. You can also close your entire street for a block party. You just need a certain number of people on your block to sign the form approving it.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
varenc 1y ago
site now offline: > In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore.
nomagicbullet 1y ago
> RIP > In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore. That was fast! I missed it.
rahimnathwani 1y ago
If you are happy with fewer columns and 5-day-old data, you can find it here: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citations-Fines/ab4h-6ztd/data_preview https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...
larkinrichards 1y ago
offline now. It's a reasonable to expect that this information should not be available in real time to protect parking officers. It's already published daily, as mentioned in other comments.
- drstewart 1y ago
  Funny, people don't think it was reasonable for the FAA to do the same with protecting private citizens travel data
malux85 1y ago
In my early career NZ traffic cops used to walk around with a Bluetooth printer strapped to their belt, that would print the tickets. I purchased a long range (I think 400m) Bluetooth dongle and with a bit of bash scripting we could continuously sweep the local area and then go out and move our cars, we tried pairing to the printers too but they had passkeys and we couldn’t, but they still had whatever broadcasting was active so we could at least detect them.
xg15 1y ago
Misread as "parking coops" and thought this was some interesting new concept of community-owned parking lots.
ndgold 1y ago
So incredibly cool I want this
nodesocket 1y ago
$105 fine for street cleaning violation? What an absolute racket for the city. I used to live near Union Square 7+ years ago and left for greener pastures in the south. So glad I left when I did.
aendruk 1y ago
> In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore. Anyone have a screenshot?
rimbo789 1y ago
There should be a tracker on all cars that automatically charges them a fee when they stop on public land for longer than a traffic light. You get mailed the bill monthly. Fail to pay you lose your license.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Tolled roads? Oh yes. With surge pricing? Ah fuck yeah. Come on!
xbar 1y ago
It was great while it lasted.
jcalvinowens 1y ago
I gotta say, it's incredibly inconsiderate and thoughtless to publish the real time location of a bunch of public safety officers in an individually identifiable way. I understand the sentiment, and I appreciate the hackery... but you put these people at risk today. You need to think much more carefully about how you approach things like this in the future.
- dymk 1y ago
  I’m playing the world’s smallest violin for those poor parking enforcement officers
  - blactuary 1y ago
    Parking enforcement is unequivocally good and these people are not regular cops
    - shinypants 1y ago
      I have to disagree that it is unequivocally good as many of the tickets SFMTA writes are for minor inconsequential violations and are disproportionately punitive. Obviously this is my opinion and personal experience but in the past 6 months I have received multiple tickets for not turning my wheels enough on a flat street, tickets for missing license plates (it was just not visible), and for miscommunication between the residential permitting and parking authority. Each of these was over $100 and/or required me to spend a considerable amount of effort to resolve. More than any other city I have lived in the parking authority seems almost adversarial to car ownership and streamlining of the bureaucracy related to car ownership.
- RS-232 1y ago
  I disagree. There should be no expectation of privacy for any public officer. Things like this website, body cameras, and FOIA requests are all for the public good. Expose corruption and keep everyone safer with a little accountability.
  - 1y ago
truted2 1y ago
I know this isn't federal jurisdiction but ever since reading the executive order issued yesterday and the quite vague description of what is Antifa I wonder if this type of interference/obstruction of law will start to be prosecuted. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
- tdeck 1y ago
  It's vague on purpose. Just like MS13 or Tren de Aragua, it can be whatever they want it to be.
aussieguy1234 1y ago
Excellent work. It would be great to have this in my city. Parking cops can't be everywhere at once. Generally I don't bother paying for public parking and just risk the fine unless I know i'm in an area with a lot of parking officers (i.e. my local CBD), I find I actually save more money this way. Some charges are insane, like $10 per hour to park near the beach in a richy rich suburb - unless you are one of the local wealthy residents, then its free. Perhaps this could be combined with some kind of SMS alerts, i.e. if I park at a location I can be alerted if a fine is issued?
esbranson 1y ago
> lightning speed, the SF government changed The most impressive thing about this. Not to diminish Riley Walz's work, which is also impressive.
joshfraser 1y ago
There are a ton of interesting use-cases for public city data. When I was an Airbnb host, I built an early alert system to send me email if my address was ever reported or under investigation. The government moves at a snails pace, so anyone who was paying attention would have plenty of time to cure any issues before any formal investigation was even started. I even had a personal dashboard showing how the enforcement office operated, how many investigators they had, which neighborhoods were getting the most enforcement actions, stats on how cases were resolved, how long they took, etc.
felgueres 1y ago
For those in sf who want a reminder app to avoid street cleaning parking tickets, I built this app last year: https://streetcleaningparking.com https://streetcleaningparking.com
psawaya 1y ago
Looks like it's back up! https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1970722519918498102 https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1970722519918498102
thisOtterBeGood 1y ago
You could imagine that it won't work for long after publishing this. I would've either used it for myself and my friends or messaged the city about this straight away, so they can avoid things like that. I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  > I would've either used it for myself and my friends > I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.
varenc 1y ago
I suspect is the source of the data: https://prdwmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/dispute_request.jsp https://prdwmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/di... The online tool that lets you pay a citation doesn't list the citation's address, but that one above does. It's protected with a CAPTCHA, but a very weak one that's definitely no longer effective in our current era. My guess is the company SF hires to handles their parking citations will deploy reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare's anti-bot very soon. Though might be complicated given all the legal compliance stuff. --- This is the company SF and many others use to handle citations: https://www.conduent.com/ https://www.conduent.com/ brochure about their parking product: https://downloads.conduent.com/content/usa/en/brochure/total-parking-management.pdf https://downloads.conduent.com/content/usa/en/brochure/total...
- varenc 1y ago
  According to twitter they deployed cloudflare! https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1971003420317520042 https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1971003420317520042
nmeofthestate 1y ago
Don't think I've ever seen traffic wardens referred to as "parking cops" before. Is that a common usage in America?
ajoshu 1y ago
I seen a post about this on insta this morning, awesome project, of course it's SF
VoidWhisperer 1y ago
Top comment might be inaccurate now - it seems that the site is showing recent data again (as recent as 24 minutes ago).
- ramon156 1y ago
  +1 working again
mutator 1y ago
The quality of the outcome of the street cleaning process is at best meh. Certainly not worth the high dollar amounts they are charging for the fees.

849 points by alazsengul 1y ago

https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/

renewiltord 1y ago

Cool app! What a pity. I wish we had more of them here in SOMA. Big open void.

supportengineer 1y ago

Very well done! Outstanding site, it is clear and easy to use. I supposed you'll be forced offline soon due to legal threats.

jacobolus 1y ago
If the goal is to prevent this kind of thing, it would probably be better to just not put the ticket info online, publicly visible, in real time.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sbarre 1y ago
  It looks like this system applied security through obscurity, more or less, though. I doubt it's the intention of the system to make all tickets "publicly visible" in this way. I'm not sure we'll legal threats involved (who knows, hopefully not) but I suspect the city will be motivated to find some way to lock down the system to prevent this kind of enumeration attack on their database.

sealthedeal 1y ago

Great job!!

packeted 1y ago

Wow, great work. This is the kind of citizen hackery we need in society :)

knowitnone3 1y ago
[flagged]
PpEY4fu85hkQpn 1y ago
Why do you think that a tool to help people break the rules is somehow good for society?
- majkinetor 1y ago
  It makes rules harder to break? It inspires kids to be knowledgeable because it can be cool? It teaches thinking outside the box? It makes you question your surroundings and not blindly following the rules?
  - oatmeal1 1y ago
    That's a list of bad reasons. Could we get a list of good reasons?
    - labubunightmare 1y ago
      > posts on Hacker News > is offended by non-conformity
- AngryData 1y ago
  Why do you think breaking rules is automatically bad for society?
  - PpEY4fu85hkQpn 1y ago
    [flagged]

lanewinfield 1y ago

another riley walz banger!!!

gala8y 1y ago
Yeah, slowly going through https://walzr.com/ https://walzr.com/. Definitely not his first rodeo.
- adolph 1y ago
  Worth it for this jpeg: https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg https://walzr.com/HDR2.jpg

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Lammy 1y ago

Love the leaderboard feature. Relevant fee breakdown: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2024/05/sfmta_fees_and_fines_for_posting_effective_april_16_2025.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

OJFord 1y ago
Seems weird to me (from nowhere near SF) that some of the cheapest things to do are to block fire stations, fire hydrants and 'fire lanes' (I assume that's like a bus lane but for fire engines, in places that's common enough for whatever reason, like right by a fire station?) - wheelchair/disability related stuff is much more penalised, but even all sorts of other 'regular' mis-parking seems for some reason slightly more expensive than blocking fire crews. Odd isn't it? Have I misunderstood?
- Lammy 1y ago
  > Have I misunderstood? It doesn't count the glass shop bill when the fire fighters gleefully fuck up your car to run the hose between the side windows.
  - apsurd 1y ago
    Gleefully? because they should express remorse and handle your car with care vs you know, putting out that fire?
    - Spivak 1y ago
      Brother in law is a firefighter, gleefully is exactly the correct term here. According to him getting to bust windows to run the hose is literally their favorite thing to do. To the point where even if they don't actually need to, or it would be slower, they'll still do it. It's apparently a matter of principle.
      - apsurd 1y ago

simonbolivar 1y ago

Love it! how do you use apple maps on web?

IncreasePosts 1y ago
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/ If you're a registered apple developer you get like 250k requests/day for free
FinnKuhn 1y ago
You can use "Map Kit JS". You have 250,000 free map views per day, however you need an apple developer account https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs

smith-kyle 1y ago

Amazing!

linehedonist 1y ago

Amazing. Would be even better if it kept everything in Pacific time. A little confusing to see “3 hours ago” just because I’m on the East Coast.

FinnKuhn 1y ago
As someone from Europe I was a bit confused why SF parking cops seemed to only work throughout the night.
pimlottc 1y ago
Ah, I’m in Central, I just assume the data feed was delayed by 2 hours for reason.

throwaway93626 1y ago

I've thought about building something that uses CV to detect parking cops near me, but this is even better! Now just add a paid feature to send alerts when there is a cop within a certain radius of you ;)

mikeodds 1y ago

Thats cool. Would be nice to see annual median take from each warden.

paulsutter 1y ago

Nice to see historical data to show ticket density somehow (different areas have very different enforcement)

enjoylife 1y ago

Officer 0336 is raking it in for the city. I wonder if there is a correlation with the areas which generate a lot of tickets and other city datasets. Perhaps crime rate or average household income?

renewiltord 1y ago
It's just his area street cleaning no? You'll get whacked by that pretty easy. On a different day might be a different guy.
jeffbee 1y ago
It's is amusing that you question whether parking citations correlate with crime rates. The reason they give out tickets for this is that these people have parked unlawfully.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  Traffic tickets are typically civil, not criminal.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > So is tax evasion No. “In the United States, tax evasion constitutes a crime” [1]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tax_evasion
      - jeffbee 1y ago
        https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6663 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6663 Moreover: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part25/irm_25-001-006 https://www.irs.gov/irm/part25/irm_25-001-006

dheera 1y ago

Need to pair this with an API for Tesla FSD so that cars just move themselves automatically

spankalee 1y ago
Or just pay the very reasonable fee for storing your private property on public land.
- dheera 1y ago
  I'm fine with paying the fee but (a) It should be automatic -- if they have the tech to enforce parking like a witch hunt, they should have the tech to just charge people for parking automatically just like Fastrak and everything else. Just have parking meters look for a Fastrak transponder and charge that account for parking, and also automatically send texts to the phone number and e-mail associated with the Fastrak account if time limit is reached. Make the city a good UX. Parking payment should be a zero-effort operation. I shouldn't have to make a wager on how many minutes I'm going to take to finish my meal and risk wagering too many minutes (overpaid) or too little (get fined). Just charge me according to my actual usage. (b) Parking signs are too goddamn hard to parse, that's the real problem.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    Believe it or not, parking reformists tend to agree! The fact we even have a parking "fine" indicates that it isn't really priced right; if you park somewhere you should just pay the market rate for doing so, whether it's for 30 minutes or 30 days. The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
  - avidiax 1y ago
    Every time I drive in SF, I pay for parking, and then get a parking ticket. Apparently I'm supposed to know that a red parking meter is for trucks. The "trucks-only sign", if there was even supposed to be one, wasn't attached to that meter or the parking sign. The other time I was the first to arrive on a block, and paid the wrong meter out of confusion.

prepend 1y ago

Clever how you figured out the pattern in ticket numbers and how they relate to individual officers.

ceayo 1y ago

Nice apple-like design, looks really good! Especially those three dots in the top-left.

pj_mukh 1y ago

Part of me says, “What a clever hack! Can I get a notification feature wrt where I parked?” The other part of me says “Can we just use Public goods more responsibly instead of scratching and clawing our way through maximizing every second of monopolizing public spaces for our personal property storage”

spankalee 1y ago

> $158 > 99 Grove St > 10:43 AM • Truck > Blocking bike lane Thank you, Officer 0227!

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lawlessone 1y ago
  >Wonders why shelves are empty when delivery drivers can't park their trucks anywhere uh don't big shops usually have truck ports?
  - mc32 1y ago
    Safeway? Sure. Mom-and-Pops? Not usually. How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park? Ok maybe in some locations they can park a few blocks away and deliver with hand trucks —but then they risk taking much more time to deliver and going back to a broken-in truck or van.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > How are small restaurants going to get their ingredients delivered if delivery trucks can’t park? The only city where this is a problem is New York, because we don’t have alleys in our densest neighbourhoods. And in New York, our solution is for folks to park illegally and the meter maids to print tickets which are treated as a business expense. In San Francisco, park in an alley, deliver at night, or park away from the site and use a scooter or whatnot to make the last mile. (Or eat the ticket.)
      - MisterTea 1y ago

MontagFTB 1y ago

This is amazing. Can we get a heat map of ticket disbursements?

spankalee 1y ago
Hopefully the city already has that, ideally correlated with the coverage from GPS on the officers' cars or devices. Then they could see where they're under-patrolling and adjust their routes to fill in the gaps.

fnord77 1y ago

Is this real time? I don't see anything moving.

baggy_trough 1y ago

What would really be incredible would be if the city made this kind of data public intentionally.

jer0me 1y ago
They do! There's a data set, updated daily: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citations-Fines/ab4h-6ztd/about_data https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation... It currently has 22 million parking tickets dating back to 2008.
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  Incredible!
- Ancapistani 1y ago
  Huh - I don't know if I like those data being available in that format. I feel like they could probably split it up so specific plates aren't available to the public alongside the lat/long. As it is, it would likely be an effective way to track someone's routines. All you need is a license plate and you can likely get a list of many places they've been since 2008. That's especially true since it includes citations for things like street cleaning violations, which in my experience most people will get at least once when living somewhere. I bet a lot of those plates can be tied to at least the block the owner resides with this dataset.

khuey 1y ago

I'd be interested in a "loserboard", i.e. who consistently writes the fewest tickets.

jakelazaroff 1y ago
The loserboard I'd be interested in is which license plates consistently receive the most tickets.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway93626 1y ago
  I'd guess the top spots are just super wealthy people who figure that at their "hourly rate", paying for parking is basically more costly than just eating the tickets. Like if someone's time is worth $10k+/hour, the parking tickets are basically just premium parking fees that are still "cheaper" than spending even a minute dealing with payment... Let your assistant pay whatever tickets you get in the mail instead.
  - edm0nd 1y ago
    This was our old CFO. He would park directly in front of our office building that was located inside a large complex that had a movie theater, fancy restaurants, and all kinda stuffs like that. They couldnt tow so they would just write a ticket for being in the spot after like 60 minutes. He racked up thousands in tickets and simply just didnt pay them. Never got in trouble either lol. Since it was private property, I guess the owners just didnt care that much. He was a super douche and ended up quitting thankfully.
  - _2d30 1y ago
    They are definitely people who live in their cars and don’t pay the tickets. EDIT: did a search to see if anyone had analyzed this and here’s reporting that shows basically this. None of the top cars are remotely luxury, eg. https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/15/parking-tickets-san-francisco-sfmta-transit-car-tow-transportation-vehicles-citations/ https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/15/parking-tickets-san-franci...

whiplash451 1y ago

The reverse engineer of the ID system is worth its pound of google riddle. Well done.

spankalee 1y ago

It would be great to see more automatic payment and enforcement. It's great that buses can issue tickets for blocking bus lanes, but I would absolutely love for their to be more automatic enforcement of blocking bike lanes and meter violations. I'm not in SF a lot these days, but I have noticed some particularly fancy parking meters that at least have tap-to-pay and might have more. Instead of a ticket, you should just be charged for how long you stay. And instead of a strict time limit, just raise the rates the longer you parks.

aidenn0 1y ago
Is it illegal to block bike lanes in SF? I ask because it is not illegal to do so in California, according to the learner's permit test my daughter recently took.
- scottbez1 1y ago
  The DMV is unfortunately wrong about this, with an invalid interpretation of CVC - the DMV handbook is NOT the law (it's a simplistic layman's interpretation), and is not a valid legal defense. That said, in SF proper it's absolutely inarguably illegal as a violation called "Obstructing traffic" in the SF transportation code. A bike lane is an active travel lane for vehicles as defined under the CVC (including bicycles), and therefore stopping in one is illegal just like stopping in a car lane. I've had drivers cited for this in the past.
  - rahimnathwani 1y ago
    I've had drivers cited for this in the past. I'm curious how you've managed to achieve this? I haven't found SF311 very responsive to requests related to illegal parking. Even if they respond, wouldn't the car be gone by the time they show up?
    - scottbez1 1y ago
      Yeah, they ignore SF311 reports by policy. I've managed it by flagging down an amazingly helpful parking control officer that happened to be in the area, or else by calling and reporting an obstruction of traffic (not mentioning the bike lane) and then waiting until the PCO arrived and talking to them. The officers have almost always been helpful, but I think they generally tend towards lower confrontation and more "efficient" violations like street sweeping or expired meters by default (or perhaps directed by management).

MontagFTB 1y ago

[flagged]

kenmacd 1y ago

+11 and +4 seem check-digit-y From the limited dataset it looks the last digit comes from: last digit = (<sum of previous the digits> + 2) mod 7

Aloisius 1y ago
It is a check digit, but it's just: n % 7. So ticket 98494660 has citation #984,946,605 Ticket 98494661 will have citation #984,946,616 (The example of the pattern mistakenly starts with an citation number #984,946,606 which they said does not exist, rather than #984,946,605 which is the one shown in the image)

jimmyl02 1y ago

This is super fun! The apple maps look for the "Find My" feel was a really nice touch

jshchnz 1y ago

this guy never misses

_2d30 1y ago

Oh man this is so fun but I slightly hate it. It probably won’t help people avoid parking enforcement much but it could somewhat which sucks because I think parking enforcement is a very good thing. More, I worry about the chance a deranged person uses it to track a specific SFMTA agent who gave them a ticket.

apavlinovic 1y ago

This works and feels amazing. How are you doing the swipe up panel?

poorman 1y ago

Someone should plot this on a heat map so we can see what areas the parking cops don't write tickets for!

kami8845 1y ago

Amazing to see the scale of it. As a piece of feedback my assumption is that different officers are assigned to different areas and so since street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas, this will allow different officers to float to the top in different weeks. Having at least a 2 week lookback for the leaderboard is probably best. Otherwise great work!

Swizec 1y ago
> street sweeping is either the first and third or second and fourth week of the month for most residential areas On my block we get it 2x/week. I've never seen a street sweeper come by and the street is always dirty, but I sure have gotten tickets for leaving my vehicle out front overnight on the wrong day.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I think the street is dirty precisely because there are vehicles out on the wrong day such that the street sweeper couldn't sweep that part of the street. Getting a ticket means the street sweeper couldn't do its job and you don't see clean streets.
- gregschlom 1y ago
  As far as I know you only get a ticket if you're actually parked there when the sweeper comes by. There's a parking cop car following the sweeper and ticketing the cars. You're allowed to re-park in the street after the sweeper has done its job, even if it's still technically street sweeping time. So if you've got a ticket, there almost certainly was a sweeper that came by at that time.
  - dodos 1y ago
    Pretty sure it varies depending on where you live. iirc When I was in SF the tickets would get distributed ahead of time and the sweeper would follow within an hour or so. Once the sweeper went by you were free to re-park.

obblekk 1y ago

This is awesome. Coolest hacker demo I've seen in a while.

scottbez1 1y ago

Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets. I get it - street cleaning are "easy" tickets to write in bulk, and therefore efficient ROI for PCO time, but they're not the most important violations to cite compared to safety-critical things like blocked bike lanes (which SFMTA has an official policy to completely ignore citizen reports thereof), double-parking, or red zone (including daylighting) violations. Part of the issue is improper fine structure (though I think this is at least partly controlled by the state?) - tickets for blocking a bike lane are rarely written and therefore it's a good bet to just do it and odds are in aggregate it's cheaper than paying for parking legally. UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Uber etc rely on this as a cheap cost of doing business, externalizing their costs onto the safety of the public. SFMTA even offers bulk payment discounts to UPS, when they should be charging escalating fines for repeat offenders.

potato3732842 1y ago
>Incredible work. I'm disappointed to see so many of the leaderboard items are street cleaning tickets. Why wouldn't it be? It's basically spawn camping or deer baiting or shooting fish in a barrel or whatever analogy you want to use.
- scottbez1 1y ago
  Agreed, and it provides important revenue for transportation projects and helps keep our streets clean so I wouldn't want SFMTA to adjust that focus as-is. I just wish we had proper (read: higher, accounting for real negative externalities and likelihood of citation) fines for other violations that pose active public safety concerns such that SFMTA would be incentivized to also focus on those and not just the "easy" ones. It would also disincentivize antisocial behavior by repeat offenders.
hahahacorn 1y ago
On principle, I agree. In practice, delivery vehicles don't have a place to safely stop, because that space is allocated to free street parking for private vehicles. Subsidized street parking for cars are externalizing their costs onto UPS/Fedex/Amazon, etc. who are then passing that cost along to the safety of the public.

primitivesuave 1y ago

I did a fascinating analysis of SFMTA data a few years back. They posted a public list of names and license plates [1] that they refuse to take down, despite many emails from me over the years. I found a particular license plate that belonged to a plumber with an impeccable 5 star reputation on Yelp, whose business in SF was effectively ended by street sweeping fines. He accidentally paid the same ticket twice, which resulted in his work vehicle being towed for excessive delinquency on the original ticket, which culminated in him moving his plumbing business to Utah. I mentioned his 5 star reputation because several people got on Yelp over the years and described situations where he wouldn't even charge them money if he could fix something in a few minutes. It was very sad to learn how the SFTMA ran an honest plumber out of our city, and still won't take his name down off the list below (even 8 years after the deadline to respond). I don't mean to draw undue attention to that list - please bombard the SFTMA with emails to take it down, it is a very obvious invasion of privacy and laughably unnecessary. 1. https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-2017 https://www.sfmta.com/reports/escheatment-posting-october-20...

hn_throw_250915 1y ago
Reading this comment I’m stumped as to what SF can learn from this. There’s a lesson in there somewhere but I have no idea what it could be. Oh well. https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fBoqMMPoU9k https://m.youtube.com/shorts/fBoqMMPoU9k
ronsor 1y ago
> street sweeping fines Why the hell does SF need to sweep the streets so much?
- mmmlinux 1y ago
  From all the trash that everyone leaves everywhere. and broken glass from car windows getting smashed in. its not a nice place.
- scottbez1 1y ago
  Generally to keep streets safe to drive on, and pleasant to live near. In particular, SF receives very little rainfall for most of the year, which means that leaves and debris easily accumulate rather than being washed away at regular intervals. Drivers also have a tendency to leave parts of their vehicles - like broken glass and plastic/metal shards - behind when they routinely crash into each other, which accumulate on the street. Without regular sweeping, those can pose hazards to other drivers and bicyclists, and risk being washed into the bay via storm drains if not swept.

RyanOD 1y ago

Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb making it almost impossible to see oncoming traffic from the right or left. Really scary when you have a 16-year old driver you're trying to keep safe. There is a very real reason why most intersections require drivers to park 20-30 feet away. Please think of the safety of others and adhere to this rule.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vhcr 1y ago
This is solved with better infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension
- RyanOD 1y ago
  Yes, I've seen some of this. While it certainly helps, it seems like a waste of limited resources. Why can't some people just follow such a simple rule?
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Waste of what resources? If anything I'd expect the sidewalk to be cheaper.
    - godelski 1y ago
      There's a difference between starting from scratch and modifying existing infrastructure
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        There is. But the post saying it's a better method isn't suggesting extra labor to do modifications. That's useful just as pure knowledge, and also it can be applied into future designs or when parts of the road wear out.

jonahx 1y ago

What's funny is secure IDs could have easily prevented this but, even if the city discovers it and wants to shut it down now, I'd bet actually fixing the system would be too costly (IDs tend to couple to everything).

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mulmen 1y ago
Just add a delay.
odensc 1y ago
Pretty simple fix: require more data to look up a citation, like the number, issue date and plate/VIN (this is how my city does it). Technically doesn't make the scraping impossible if you wanna try every permutation of a license plate, but makes it mostly infeasible. Currently it just requires the sequential citation number [1], which is how the data is being scraped so easily. [1]: https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input.jsp https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input...
edm0nd 1y ago
super easy fix just update all the tickets at the end of the day in one single batch / put time delay on the data renders the site useless instantly

dcreater 1y ago

wow, great work. But is this legal? Feels like no and will be takendown

dcreater 1y ago
Looks like I was right - took all of 4hrs to go down.

Supercompressor 1y ago

FYI the ticketing time is showing incorrectly out of Pacific time, e.g. here in Eastern all recent activity shows as 3 hours ago. Not a big deal as almost all users would be in Pacific, but wanted to mention. Great work though, this is rad.

jonny_eh 1y ago

Probably a good time to tell people that SF operates a "Text Before Tow Program" where you can get a warning that you're about to get towed: https://www.sfmta.com/text-tow-program https://www.sfmta.com/text-tow-program

ihaveajob 1y ago
This is fantastic. It really signals that the point is not to get money from you, but to free up the parking spot.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  They also ticket without towing, where the point is entirely to get money from you.
  - godelski 1y ago
    Or to say "don't do this"
  - arghwhat 1y ago
    Where I'm from there's no concept of towing on any parking violations. No one has the right to touch your vehicle, and if the police is involved they'd just contact the owner. The police would only move a car if it's a danger to the public. A tow truck is only something you'd call for assistance, not something you fear seeing. (Parking fines suck, but the municipal ones are usually more reasonable here, even if they don't always get the rules right. It's the parking companies managing large private parking lots, often for free to the lot owner, that are absurd.)
    - noahlt 1y ago
      Where I'm from there's no concept of using public space to store your personal belongings without paying for it.
      - 1y ago

dinkblam 1y ago

can you find out how much revenue the city makes each week with those tickets?

primitivesuave 1y ago
No - you would have to file a FOIA request with the SFMTA, and then tabulate the "Total Paid" column in the response files. Below is my FOIA request template for the SFMTA [1] to assist anyone who is interested in doing this. > Please provide all possible information on all parking citations issued between 2009 and the present day. This should include any information related to the car (make, etc), license plate, ticket, ticketer, ticket reason(s), financial information (paid, etc), court information (contested, etc), situational (eg, time, location), and photos/videos. Specifically, please provide the most recent data from the dataset I have received in past FOIA requests, with the following headers: > Issue Year, Ticket Number, Tick Issue Date, Tick Issue Time, Agency, Tick Badge Issued, Veh Make, Veh Body, Tick VIN, Tick RP State, Tick RP Plate, Plate Exp Date, Violation, Violation Desc, Tick Meter, Tick Street No, Tick Street Name, Suspend Code, Suspend Desc, Tick Suspend Date, Tick Dispo Code, Tick Dispo Desc, Tick Dispo Date Total Paid, Total Amt Due 1. https://www.sfmta.com/public-records-requests https://www.sfmta.com/public-records-requests
geor9e 1y ago
You can look at the leaderboard at the end of the day and sum the daily intake if you want.

1zael 1y ago

I'm missing something here. How did you get the dataset for this? And that too, in real-time?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
- 1zael 1y ago
  ahh thank you!
k8sToGo 1y ago
Explained here https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/
- 1zael 1y ago
  ahh thank you!
vanshg 1y ago
Explained here: https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/ https://walzr.com/sf-parking/about/

assemmedhat 1y ago

Awesome. The leading officer in the dashboard should have a raise :)

alexchantavy 1y ago

Oh wow this is from the same author as https://walzr.com/bop-spotter https://walzr.com/bop-spotter -- love these projects

samtheDamned 1y ago
Oh I remember this website nice to be reminded of this!
rconti 1y ago
I knew that domain name (which is blocked at work, for some reason) sounded familiar. So wait. cop-spotter is brought to you by the people who brought you bop-spotter?
- beeb 1y ago
  dop-spotter is next
  - rconti 1y ago
    That's easy, it'll mostly highlight North Beach[1] 1. https://italysegreta.com/dop-ingredients-of-neapolitan-pizza/ https://italysegreta.com/dop-ingredients-of-neapolitan-pizza...
  - ericcumbee 1y ago
    Hold for wap-spotter
barbazoo 1y ago
Odd detail about the page, on the left it says "Audio feed courtesy of Orchestra" but the link goes to some dystopian panopticon kinda surveillance app.
- hundchenkatze 1y ago
  I think they're being cheeky. I assume Orchestra is the dystopian company providing the "ShotSpotter" service to SF, and bop spotter is piggy backing on the api.

Ancapistani 1y ago

This is kinda taking me aback a bit :). I live in a small town (<15k), with the nearest city of 100k people or more several hours away. Having this degree of detail and low latency is impressive. I happen to be in SF right now on business, and walked outside. There was an officer about a block away, right where the map said they were ~10m ago.

smurda 1y ago

This is why the internet and HN should exist <3

Simulacra 1y ago

Fascinating and good to see enforcement actually occuring

thatguymike 1y ago

This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1... Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.

Alive-in-2025 1y ago
Excellent idea. Data trails would really show you have are walking their beat. So the obvious next step is randomizing the IDs of the ticket writers.
typeofhuman 1y ago
It's down.
- hk__2 1y ago
  It’s up again.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

ProofHouse 1y ago

Can the city just keep the top five and fire the rest, you know tax savings lol although I’d get a parking ticket, surely

hobofan 1y ago
Not sure if there are any tax savings to be had. Even the 100th place on the leaderboard netted $2k in a half day of working, so I think every single one of them may provide positive income for the city.
hnav 1y ago
traffic enforcement is pretty much the only cashflow positive city business

neilv 1y ago

Let's say that some people are opposed to the city's enforcement of parking rules against them (people who don't want parking tickets for overstaying in a spot, nor for parking somewhere they aren't supposed to). Let's also say that some other people support the enforcement against that first group (e.g., small brick&mortar businesses, and people who want more parking available for quick errands). If the Opposed group uses big data to work around the enforcement, does that hurt the Supports group? What's fair in that situation?

threatofrain 1y ago
Opposition must come through legal means, because the cheapness and omnipresence of enforcement is only getting better, especially for SFPD on the tech front.
Brian_K_White 1y ago
Who used big data first, who uses big data more, who has more big data to work with, who has big data they get to keep to themselves and who has to work with only big data that both have the same access to? F this supposed see the other side question.
bko 1y ago
San Francisco has a system for reporting parking violations. Residents can report illegal parking such as blocked driveways, sidewalk obstructions, double parking, and abandoned vehicles through the city’s SF311 platform. You can make a report on the 311 website, mobile app, or by calling 311. You receive a tracking number to monitor the response. https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center https://www.sf.gov/departments--311-customer-service-center
appreciatorBus 1y ago
Just charge market rates for land. Overstaying (aka overconsumption) is mostly just a predictable consequence of selling something valuable at far below what its value.
- nick49488171 1y ago

morkalork 1y ago

Hey @OP, make a leader board for the license plate with the most infractions

obventio56 1y ago

I would pay ~$10/month for email alerts when an officer is within a geofence of my car.

ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
Then someone will know where your car is at all times, and probably who you are... and that is monetizable (not from you).
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Google maps is free to use so obviously I'm the product Google sells. I'd say I'm getting a fair deal letting "them" track my location. (Why does nobody ever complain about them insisting on gender neutral pronouns? They must be very powerful.)
  - runjake 1y ago
    Often times, even if you pay, you're still the product a company sells.
- jaggederest 1y ago
  If you do not believe that is already true on multiple axes, you are probably mistaken. The combination of automated license plate scanners, phone beacon data, and behavioral metrics make that relatively straightforward to get, in aggregate. I worked on a project where we could tell how many users were in a given store at a time (historically, not realtime) based on wifi traces, mobile data aggregation from carriers, and bluetooth pings. We could generally back it up to even general demographic data like how much disposable income the users were likely to have. Interesting project, deeply worrying how much data is running around out there.
- obventio56 1y ago
  If there is someone who wants this data, I am happy to sell... no need for a middle man.
- AngryData 1y ago

giarc 1y ago

Officer 0438 appears to have begun his shift in Guadalajara https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS https://imgur.com/a/u4hg8DS

madamelic 1y ago
Oh my god. A $107 ticket for an EXPIRED METER?! That's insanity. Turns out more than just thieves are thieves in SF.
uyzstvqs 1y ago
Appears to have been given on 3 El Dorado South, San Francisco. The map marker shows a street called Avenida South San Francisco, Mexico, in front of a bar called El Dorado.
supportengineer 1y ago
It's quite common for Bay Area workers to have a "supercommute"
- RS-232 1y ago
  Don’t give ICE any ideas!

nycdatasci 1y ago

How are you handling the auth token/captcha on the website? I'm not a legal expert, but my impression is that automated solving of captchas during a scrape carries higher risk. That said, amazing project!

devadvance 1y ago

Very cool! There are a ton of opportunities like this with SF systems! For folks wondering about the public nature of this data: SFMTA separately publishes a full data set daily: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citations-Fines/ab4h-6ztd/about_data https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...

lavela 1y ago

Great implementation but reading the comments I wonder if there is really no sense of the streets as a commons you should use responsibly at all in the US. Not that I am not annoyed by parking tickets, but I am also thankful for the enforcement when I use any means of moving through the city other than a car and at least where I live parking violations are really under-enforced. Maybe that's the difference in San Francisco?

hnav 1y ago
Very little of that anywhere in the country, especially when it's the rights of drivers vs other road users. San Francisco is a bit better but gets bad when it goes through its boom cycles that bring lots of people in.
smegma2 1y ago
I agree with the sentiment but I want to point out that a car is not essential for most people living in SF, although many people outside the city think this. Around 35% of households don’t have a car: https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2021/02/survey_findings_demographics.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
nick_ 1y ago
Nope, same in Toronto. Same everywhere I've been. Drivers all mentally turn into teenagers when it comes to anything to do with driving/parking. I'm very pro traffic and parking enforcement.
PpEY4fu85hkQpn 1y ago
[flagged]

bfrink 1y ago

Seems that something's been broken. The normal way to look up ticket images manually at https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ no longer works, returning "Unauthorized" even after properly getting past the CAPTCHA.

geor9e 1y ago

"each possible ticket number follows a pattern: add 11, except add 4 if the last digit is 6…Only God knows why" That pattern feels suspiciously like how a tacked-on modulo check-digit would act. It seems the real citation number, x, excludes the last digit, and you only needed to +1 increment to it. Then they tack on a last digit, a check-digit, of (x+1) mod 7. That would be the same pattern. The contract for the system does have the clause "validate the data transcribed from handwritten Citations…a check-digit algorithm to control errors in the Citation number field" https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2018/03/4-3-18_item_14_contract_-_citation_and_permit_processing.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

refurb 1y ago
Nice observation!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Aloisius 1y ago
It's just x % 7. They started their example pattern with an citation number 984,946,606 they earlier said wasn't valid rather than 984,946,605 given initially (and shown in the image).
- pertsix 1y ago
  But why?
  - Aloisius 1y ago
    Just a mistake, I imagine. Probably just typed the pattern out starting with the last number they wrote, which unfortunately was invalid. > I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. ... So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610
  - dragontamer 1y ago

cramcgrab 1y ago

Division I, Section 7.3.3 Obstruction of Traffic Without Permit $1,000.00 “officer, I’ve got a permit to obstruct traffic!”

zacharycohn 1y ago
Yes, things like street closures for construction, film shoots, or Neighborhood Night Outs would all need permits to obstruct traffic/close the street.
- xenadu02 1y ago
  Fun fact: as a regular citizen you can apply for such a permit online. I did this when we were moving houses to ensure the entire block in front of our house would be clear of cars (or we could tow if required) to make it possible to get a moving truck in on the one-lane street where double-parking would block all access. I filled out the forms. A week or so later the city dropped signs on the sidewalk warning of the upcoming closure. You can also close your entire street for a block party. You just need a certain number of people on your block to sign the form approving it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

varenc 1y ago

site now offline: > In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore.

nomagicbullet 1y ago

> RIP > In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore. That was fast! I missed it.

rahimnathwani 1y ago

If you are happy with fewer columns and 5-day-old data, you can find it here: https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citations-Fines/ab4h-6ztd/data_preview https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/SFMTA-Parking-Citation...

larkinrichards 1y ago

offline now. It's a reasonable to expect that this information should not be available in real time to protect parking officers. It's already published daily, as mentioned in other comments.

drstewart 1y ago
Funny, people don't think it was reasonable for the FAA to do the same with protecting private citizens travel data

malux85 1y ago

In my early career NZ traffic cops used to walk around with a Bluetooth printer strapped to their belt, that would print the tickets. I purchased a long range (I think 400m) Bluetooth dongle and with a bit of bash scripting we could continuously sweep the local area and then go out and move our cars, we tried pairing to the printers too but they had passkeys and we couldn’t, but they still had whatever broadcasting was active so we could at least detect them.

xg15 1y ago

Misread as "parking coops" and thought this was some interesting new concept of community-owned parking lots.

ndgold 1y ago

So incredibly cool I want this

nodesocket 1y ago

$105 fine for street cleaning violation? What an absolute racket for the city. I used to live near Union Square 7+ years ago and left for greener pastures in the south. So glad I left when I did.

aendruk 1y ago

> In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore. Anyone have a screenshot?

rimbo789 1y ago

There should be a tracker on all cars that automatically charges them a fee when they stop on public land for longer than a traffic light. You get mailed the bill monthly. Fail to pay you lose your license.

renewiltord 1y ago
Tolled roads? Oh yes. With surge pricing? Ah fuck yeah. Come on!

xbar 1y ago

It was great while it lasted.

jcalvinowens 1y ago

I gotta say, it's incredibly inconsiderate and thoughtless to publish the real time location of a bunch of public safety officers in an individually identifiable way. I understand the sentiment, and I appreciate the hackery... but you put these people at risk today. You need to think much more carefully about how you approach things like this in the future.

dymk 1y ago
I’m playing the world’s smallest violin for those poor parking enforcement officers
- blactuary 1y ago
  Parking enforcement is unequivocally good and these people are not regular cops
  - shinypants 1y ago
    I have to disagree that it is unequivocally good as many of the tickets SFMTA writes are for minor inconsequential violations and are disproportionately punitive. Obviously this is my opinion and personal experience but in the past 6 months I have received multiple tickets for not turning my wheels enough on a flat street, tickets for missing license plates (it was just not visible), and for miscommunication between the residential permitting and parking authority. Each of these was over $100 and/or required me to spend a considerable amount of effort to resolve. More than any other city I have lived in the parking authority seems almost adversarial to car ownership and streamlining of the bureaucracy related to car ownership.
RS-232 1y ago
I disagree. There should be no expectation of privacy for any public officer. Things like this website, body cameras, and FOIA requests are all for the public good. Expose corruption and keep everyone safer with a little accountability.
- 1y ago

truted2 1y ago

I know this isn't federal jurisdiction but ever since reading the executive order issued yesterday and the quite vague description of what is Antifa I wonder if this type of interference/obstruction of law will start to be prosecuted. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...

tdeck 1y ago
It's vague on purpose. Just like MS13 or Tren de Aragua, it can be whatever they want it to be.

aussieguy1234 1y ago

Excellent work. It would be great to have this in my city. Parking cops can't be everywhere at once. Generally I don't bother paying for public parking and just risk the fine unless I know i'm in an area with a lot of parking officers (i.e. my local CBD), I find I actually save more money this way. Some charges are insane, like $10 per hour to park near the beach in a richy rich suburb - unless you are one of the local wealthy residents, then its free. Perhaps this could be combined with some kind of SMS alerts, i.e. if I park at a location I can be alerted if a fine is issued?

esbranson 1y ago

> lightning speed, the SF government changed The most impressive thing about this. Not to diminish Riley Walz's work, which is also impressive.

joshfraser 1y ago

There are a ton of interesting use-cases for public city data. When I was an Airbnb host, I built an early alert system to send me email if my address was ever reported or under investigation. The government moves at a snails pace, so anyone who was paying attention would have plenty of time to cure any issues before any formal investigation was even started. I even had a personal dashboard showing how the enforcement office operated, how many investigators they had, which neighborhoods were getting the most enforcement actions, stats on how cases were resolved, how long they took, etc.

felgueres 1y ago

For those in sf who want a reminder app to avoid street cleaning parking tickets, I built this app last year: https://streetcleaningparking.com https://streetcleaningparking.com

psawaya 1y ago

Looks like it's back up! https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1970722519918498102 https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1970722519918498102

thisOtterBeGood 1y ago

You could imagine that it won't work for long after publishing this. I would've either used it for myself and my friends or messaged the city about this straight away, so they can avoid things like that. I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.

4gotunameagain 1y ago
> I would've either used it for myself and my friends > I don't like these kind of apps that allow people to be smart around regulations that should apply for everyone.

varenc 1y ago

I suspect is the source of the data: https://prdwmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/dispute_request.jsp https://prdwmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/di... The online tool that lets you pay a citation doesn't list the citation's address, but that one above does. It's protected with a CAPTCHA, but a very weak one that's definitely no longer effective in our current era. My guess is the company SF hires to handles their parking citations will deploy reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare's anti-bot very soon. Though might be complicated given all the legal compliance stuff. --- This is the company SF and many others use to handle citations: https://www.conduent.com/ https://www.conduent.com/ brochure about their parking product: https://downloads.conduent.com/content/usa/en/brochure/total-parking-management.pdf https://downloads.conduent.com/content/usa/en/brochure/total...

varenc 1y ago
According to twitter they deployed cloudflare! https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1971003420317520042 https://x.com/rtwlz/status/1971003420317520042

nmeofthestate 1y ago

Don't think I've ever seen traffic wardens referred to as "parking cops" before. Is that a common usage in America?

ajoshu 1y ago

I seen a post about this on insta this morning, awesome project, of course it's SF

VoidWhisperer 1y ago

Top comment might be inaccurate now - it seems that the site is showing recent data again (as recent as 24 minutes ago).

ramon156 1y ago
+1 working again

mutator 1y ago

The quality of the outcome of the street cleaning process is at best meh. Certainly not worth the high dollar amounts they are charging for the fees.